Successful betting exchange customers require access to information in real-time. Betfair’s polling implementation was not up to delivering live data at a high scale. The company chose Diffusion to deliver live score and pricing information, in real-time, to their customers. In a bid to improve its online customer experience and to extend its competitive advantage, Betfair decided to move from polling to streaming technology to deliver real-time score and pricing data to customers. Betfair evaluated five potential solutions and selected Diffusion to quickly, robustly, and securely achieve its vision with minimal changes to its existing infrastructure.
On peak days, Betfair saved 80-90 GB of bandwidth thanks to real-time streaming updates.
Diffusion’s pre-packaged APIs integrated easily
into Betfair’s existing back-end servers.
Real-time odds and results enhanced user engagement across platforms.
Operating in the highly competitive gaming market populated by increasingly savvy customers with high service expectations, Betfair handles a massive volume of fast-changing data daily, and they must present it to customers quickly and efficiently to prompt betting activity. A traditional polling model does not offer the scalability, speed, and performance that Betfair requires to manage rapidly fluctuating real-time data delivery. No matter how unpredictable the demand, Betfair had to be able to present frequently changing data at very low latency so, customers could leverage betting opportunities. At peak times – such as a major football game on a Saturday afternoon, Betfair’s pricing service received tens of thousands of data requests from customers every second. As Daniel Alheiros, Delivery Manager at Betfair, explains, “Our systems handle very high volumes of changing data, and we needed a way to present this data to our customers at very low latency and to prompt betting activity.”
Betfair needed a real-time streaming solution to improve the overall performance and scalability of its in-place service response model, reducing network traffic and load on its servers for a faster and more engaging user experience. It also needed the flexibility to support any mobile or Internet device its customers choose to use without major development requirements. With many customers accessing the company’s interactive services using a smartphone or tablet device, Betfair also had to address the fact that mobile users were experiencing poor performance due to network and device responsiveness issues. “When we looked at mobile, we realized that the request-response model in place was affecting our customers’ device performance, leading to a poor user experience,” said Alheiros. “We needed web browsers on mobile devices to receive and process information more efficiently, and also, in the case of mobile, handle the challenges of loss of connectivity. Solving these issues would reduce the load on our servers and increase responsiveness, ultimately giving our customers the quality of experience they should expect from our brand.”
Following an extensive evaluation, Betfair selected Diffusion as the best solution to meet its needs. Easy to implement and requiring limited infrastructure remodelling, Diffusion supports all current and future devices and resolves Betfair’s mission-critical latency issues. “Diffusion allows us to provide services using various native network transport protocols such as Web sockets, Flash sockets and Silverlight. This makes it easy for us to support all mobile devices and web browsers. It also contains APIs that make it easy to implement new applications, significantly reducing our time to market with new services,” explains Alheiros. Integrating Diffusion into Betfair’s systems was fast and efficient. Diffusion’s pre-packaged APIs integrated easily into Betfair’s existing back-end servers. Following a performance testing program, Betfair went into live production just three months after the start of the project.
Betfair can stream information directly to user browsers, notifying and updating customers with scores and pricing information within milliseconds of a change taking place. Implementation Diffusion means that customers are immediately notified of any change instead of having to refresh score information continually. As a result of reducing the volume of requests that the company’s servers have to manage, Betfair’s website and web services are far more responsive.
DiffusionData’s flagship offering Diffusion® is a secure, real-time Pub/Sub server built for mobile, web, and AI applications. Its patented delta-compression reduces bandwidth by up to 90%, enabling scalable data streaming with minimal latency. Used across financial services, gaming, and transport for mission-critical applications where personalisation and speed matter.
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